Chapter 7: THE CRIMSON RECKONING
1528 Words
Kaelen’s POV
The forest air was biting, but it couldn’t cool the fire raging in my veins. I walked with the heavy, rhythmic stride of a predator that had no home left to return to, leaving the small outbuilding where Elara slept, or tried to sleep behind me. My mind was a storm of her whispers, her visions, and the impossible light I had seen dancing beneath her skin.
“She was supposed to be human. Yes, she’s human,” I choked out, the words feeling like shards of glass in my throat.
I stopped by a jagged outcrop of rock and slammed my fist into the stone, watching sparks fly as granite cracked beneath my knuckles.
“How can she be the one to save me? My curse, my bloodline… it’s a death sentence, not a puzzle to be solved.”
I laughed out loud, a harsh, jagged sound that startled the nocturnal birds from the canopy. My heart was a chaotic mess of hope and terror.
“Is Elara really my savior? Should I believe her dreams, or is the Moon Goddess playing a cruel game with us?”
I needed to be sure. I couldn’t afford to be wrong. Not again.
My memory dragged me back to the first time I felt the bond.
I could remember vividly how my first mate died. She was strong, a high-born wolf with royal blood running through her veins. She could shift with the grace of a mountain cat and wield the elements like extensions of her will. Yet she had withered in my arms as if I were a walking plague.
How the curse took her, how it drained the light from her eyes in a single night of agony, was a void I had never been able to fill.
But Elara… Elara claimed the King had killed her indirectly.
A growl vibrated in my chest, low and tectonic. If Theron had been the one to slip the dagger into the hearts of my mates while I spent decades blaming my own soul, then there wasn’t a corner of this realm where he could hide from my wrath.
“In three days,” I muttered, lifting my gaze to the sky where the moon sat like a pale, unblinking eye. “The moon will turn red.”
Just as Elara said.
The words felt like a noose tightening around my neck. The curse I dreaded most, the one I feared beyond death, was coming for me. Not just the curse of the Mate-Killer, but the ancient, rot-born sickness that struck every decade under the Blood Moon.
Goddess, this was the part of me I never wanted to experience again.
The last time the moon turned that sickly shade of crimson, I had been locked in the silver-lined dungeons of the Citadel. I remembered the sensation of my own blood boiling, the feeling of invisible claws tearing at my internal organs as the curse tried to rip my wolf from my soul.
I had shifted and un-shifted for seventy-two hours straight—bones breaking, resetting, breaking again until I was nothing but a screaming mass of fur and agony.
I had almost welcomed death then.
To face it now, with a mate who was fragile and human, felt like a sick joke orchestrated by the fates.
The wind suddenly died.
The crickets went silent.
A blur of white light… pallid and translucent, flickered through the trees to my left. It was gone before I could track it, a streak of ethereal mist shaped disturbingly like a human form.
I blinked hard, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. My heart slammed against my ribs.
“I’m losing it,” I hissed into the darkness. “The curse is already clawing at my mind.”
Then it happened again.
The ghost ran past me, closer this time, the air in its wake smelling of graveyard dirt and ozone.
I spun, every sense sharpening to a lethal edge.
“Show yourself!” I thundered.
I didn’t wait for a response.
I gave in to the beast.
My clothes tore away as my bones snapped and reformed with the sound of dry wood breaking. Within seconds, I stood on four paws, a giant midnight-black wolf with eyes like molten gold. I was a mountain of muscle and fur, claws digging deep furrows into the loam.
“You must be destroyed whether you like it or not,” a voice echoed, seeming to come from the very trees themselves. “Your bloodline will be erased from the Earth.”
I froze, ears pinning back against my skull.
That voice…
It wasn’t the shrill tone of a phantom. It was deep, resonant, and carried the weight of a thousand years of hatred.
“That voice sounds familiar,” I whispered through the mind-link, a low growl vibrating in my throat.
It was a voice from my nightmares. From the histories Theron himself had taught me.
“Show yourself, if you’re not afraid of the Day and Night!” I roared.
The sound became a physical force. Leaves tore free. Trees shook as if caught in a violent gale. Branches snapped and crashed around me.
The mist coalesced twenty feet away.
It wasn’t a ghost.
It was a projection.
A dark, shimmering image of Elder Marrek emerged, his face twisted into a mask of pure malice. Beside him stood the spectral image of my father—eyes vacant, throat slit from ear to ear.
“The King has spoken, Kaelen,” Marrek said, his eyes glowing with sickly violet light. “The Red Moon isn’t just a cycle of your curse. It is the date of your execution.”
My chest heaved.
“We let you live as a weapon,” he continued calmly, “but a weapon that finds its own will is a broken tool. And broken tools are discarded.”
“You killed them,” I snarled, my wolf’s voice a guttural rasp that shook the earth. “You killed my mates. You framed the curse to break me.”
The projection laughed, hollow and echoing.
“We didn’t just kill them, boy. We used their life force to fuel the very seal that keeps you under Theron’s thumb.”
My vision went red.
“And now,” Marrek went on, “we have a new prize. A girl with the blood of the First Luna? She won’t just be a mate, Kaelen. She will be the final sacrifice that makes the King immortal.”
I lunged.
My massive jaws snapped through the mist and met nothing.
I crashed into a towering oak, the impact splintering the trunk.
“Enjoy these last three days of sanity, Alpha,” the voice whispered as it faded into the wind. “When the Red Moon rises, you won’t just lose your life.”
“You will watch your little human burn.”
“And you will be the one to light the fire.”
I shifted back to human form, naked and trembling in the cold. My skin was slick with sweat that smelled faintly of copper.
The mark on my wrist, the one that bound me to Elara, throbbed with a dull, black light.
I stared down at my arms.
Beneath the skin, black vein-like threads crept toward my elbows.
The curse wasn’t waiting for the full moon.
It was reacting to her.
To the light she carried.
It was a trap.
Our bond wasn’t just a gift.
It was the trigger for a bomb ticking inside me for centuries.
I turned back toward the outbuilding.
I had to get her away.
I had to run.
But where do you go when the killer lives in your blood?
A sudden, piercing scream ripped through the forest.
It didn’t sound like terror.
It sounded like power.
A high-pitched frequency shattered the remaining windows of the cabin in the distance.
I ran.
My legs burned. My heart screamed her name.
I reached the clearing just as the sky split open.
A bolt of silver lightning struck the roof, but it didn’t burn. It remained, a pillar of divine light connecting earth to heaven.
And in the center of it…
A silhouette that wasn’t Elara.
Yet wore her shape.
I stopped at the edge of the clearing, breath hitching. The black veins on my arms pulsed violently in response to the silver light.
If I stepped into that circle, the curse would kill me.
If I stayed out, I would lose her.
I took a step forward.
The skin on my chest cracked and bled under the pressure of colliding magics.
“Elara!” I shouted.
She turned.
Her eyes were gone, replaced by infinite, starlit white.
She looked at me, but she didn’t see Kaelen.
She saw a monster.
“Stay back,” she said.
And her voice wasn’t hers.
It was the Moon Goddess—cold, ancient, and terrifying.
“The shadow must be purged, Kaelen Draven,” she said. “And you are dripping with it.”
She raised her hand.
The silver lightning shifted.
And aimed directly at my heart.
- Writer
